St Helens to Knutsford Great British Railway Journeys

For Victorian Britons, George Bradshaw was a household name.

At a time when railways were new,

Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them to take to the tracks.

I'm using a Bradshaw's Guide

to understand how trains transformed Britain,

its landscape, its industries, society and leisure time.

As I crisscross the country 150 years later,

it helps me to discover the Britain of today.

This week, I make tracks across the North West, through areas which

bore witness to Britain's rise as the world's leading marketplace.

I explore the bright optimism,

but also the dark underside of the Industrial Revolution.

My trip started close to the Scottish border

and took me to the heart of the beautiful Lake District,

before heading further south through a classic northern mill town.

From there, I'm travelling onwards to Merseyside's busy port

and then I'll reach my final destination on the edge

of the Peak District National Park.

On today's leg, I venture to

a Lancashire town built on coal and glass,

head westwards to the docks that received the proceeds of empire

and end up in an affluent town on the Cheshire Plain.

At my first stop, I feel the heat of modern glass-making...

I've just walked past a furnace and it's 1,600 degrees Celsius

and I can tell you it burns as you're going by.

..break into song with some not too drunken sailors...

-ALL SING:

-# Strike the bell, second mate, let us go below

# Look away to windward, you can see it's going to blow... #

..experience life in service to a Lady of the Manor...

Will there be much more to be polished this afternoon, Mr Douglas?

Considerably more, Mr Portillo. Considerably more.

..and discover a pioneering literary voice.

She was the first female social novelist.

I'm now more than halfway through my journey

and enjoying my tour of manufacturing towns in North West England.

My first stop today is St Helens, which Bradshaw's tells me

"is celebrated for its manufacture of plate and crown glass,

"got up to great perfection.

"An hour or two spent in the inspection of these works

"would amply repay the stranger."

I'm hoping that an hour or two will provide me

with a window on the Industrial Revolution.

I am on the Wigan-to-Liverpool line travelling south.

Thank you. Bye.

St Helens Station features 400 square metres of locally made glass.

I'm headed to the World Of Glass,

a museum built around the old factory buildings of Pilkington,

the only glass manufacturer in St Helens

surviving from the Victorian era.

Nowadays, the visitor enters the glass plant through

this wonderful recreation of an old bottle kiln,

a superb piece of industrial archaeology

with, incidentally, an amazing echo.

-Hello, Matt.

-Good morning. Welcome. Welcome to the World Of Glass.

Matt Buckley is from Pilkington's architectural division.

So, why was it in the first place

that glass came to be made here, in St Helens?

Well, exactly here we had everything

we needed that all came together at the same time.

You'd got the coal for the power,

you'd got the sand, which we then turned into glass,

and we have the canal here as well

that gave us the chance to bring raw materials

and take the glass before we also had the railways,

so everything came together here.

St Helens sits on the edge

of the plentiful South Lancashire coalfields

and excellent transport links were built to carry the coal to market.

That soon paved way for other businesses -

potteries, foundries and glassworks that made crown glass by hand.

Crown was one of the earliest types of mass-produced glass,

so there was a blob of glass on a tube which was then spun

to produce, with centrifugal force, a disc.

And eventually that disc could be cut into small panes,

but in the middle you were left with a bull's-eye or a bullion,

and even today you'll see some people using that in their windows,

but that was actually the poor bit of the glass that people threw away.

A new technique for making much larger panes of glass

was developed in the 1830s.

Large glass cylinders were sliced open on a table,

heated and pressed flat with a roller.

It inspired an architectural revolution -

the advent of grand glass roofs

on railway stations, museums and public buildings.

The most breathtaking example was the Crystal Palace,

housing the Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park in 1851.

The building employed 300,000 sheets of glass of the largest

size ever manufactured -

a symbol of the United Kingdom's technical ascendancy.

I have just walked past a furnace at 1,600 degrees Celsius

and I can tell you it burns as you're going by.

By 1860, three quarters of the country's window glass

was produced in 24 furnaces, nine of them at St Helens.

They operated around the clock.

This is the furnace, here.

The hot end, as it's called,

and this is where we take in the raw materials

and within there we are actually melting the glass.

So, Matt, we are facing here extraordinary heat.

Which site is this?

This is Watson Street site.

This is the site where we made our first crown of glass,

14th February 1827, on this site.

-Now, what is glass and how do you make it?

-This is what is in here.

This is the batch.

This is sand and soda ash and dolomite and, really,

we heat that to 1,600 degrees C

and then form it through the process eventually to produce

the glass as you know it.

And how are you actually producing that level of heat?

OK, we have got...

Effectively, we were burning gas to produce the heat.

We are actually mixing the gas, the gas and the air,

using a similar process than we saw right back from the 1870s.

We fire gas from this side for 20 minutes, then from the other side,

and we effectively recycle and re-use the heat.

-I wouldn't like to see your gas bill.

-It is very large, yes.

£20 million a year.

St Helens glass-makers were part of the plate-glass revolution

of the mid-19th century

and they still led in glass innovation 100 years later.

This here is a float glass plant.

It was the float glass process

invented by Sir Alistair Pilkington in 1952.

And here we actually melt the sand in exactly the same way,

but we float it on a bed of molten tin

and that is what makes it perfectly flat without imperfections.

So, the type of glass you see in today's buildings,

around the world, is float glass, using the Pilkington technology.

And this stuff is just streaming along these machines all the time?

Yes, the glass comes down in a ribbon and is chopped

and then packed, and this line will run for anything up to 20 years.

So, even in one week, we can produce 5,000 tonnes of glass -

that is half a million square metres.

Actually, in a year, we can produce enough glass

probably to go halfway around the world on this line.

So, massive amounts of glass,

almost unimaginable in terms of what architects can now do

because of the developments in glass and glazing technology.

I mean, just looking around, it seems to me that

if there was a revolution in architecture thanks to glass

in Bradshaw's time, we have had another one in the last few decades.

Absolutely.

I'm back on the tracks that were the artery of St Helens' economy,

linking it to the prosperous docks of Liverpool, my next destination.

By the 19th century, Liverpool had overtaken Bristol as Britain's

second most important port after London,

thanks to its proximity to the industrial powerhouse of Manchester.

And its railway station was perhaps designed to emphasise

this new-found status.

Liverpool Lime Street station is a perfect example

of how glass transformed British cities.

The northern canopy has a span of 200 feet

and, when it was built, around the time of my Bradshaw's Guide,

it was the broadest that had ever been built

and Victorian travellers looked up at it in awe.

Modern-day Liverpool stands in stark contrast

to the city of the mid-1800s.

The port was a gritty and chaotic place, but its system

of interconnected docks was the most sophisticated in the world.

It played a vital role in the world's largest economy,

receiving materials from the British colonies

and shipping out British manufactured goods.

The docks in Liverpool, says Bradshaw's,

are the grand lions of the town,

extending in one magnificent range of five miles along the river.

Being a child of the 1960s,

I remember that the Beatles exported the Liverpool beat to the globe

but it turns out that, decades before that,

a Mersey sound was flowing out to the world.

SEA SHANTY

The docks were swarming with tradesmen, stevedores and sailors

from all over the world, who used song to set the rhythms

for hauling ropes and heaving cargoes.

They worked here at the Albert docks, where I am meeting a Liverpool girl,

Julia Batters, a sea shanty enthusiast.

SEA SHANTY

Julia, what are sea shanties? Where do they come from?

Sea shanties are work songs.

The were sung on British merchant ships to enhance

the efficiency of the crew.

Those ships needed to travel fast,

have smaller crews than were on the Royal Navy ships,

and so they were rhythmic tunes

sung to keep people making a physical effort.

British sea shanties have travelled around the world

and back again several times.

You can hear them translated into Norwegian, into Dutch,

actually into Polish.

Some of them were adapted to singing on the rivers and

the Great Lakes in the States.

It encapsulates so much of the history

of what made the UK great and of English working people.

And this is an important heritage to preserve.

What are you doing to keep it up?

We have started a club.

Every month we sing sea shanties in the Baltic Fleet pub,

which is one of the last Sailortown pubs left in Liverpool.

Liverpool is regarded internationally

as the spiritual home of the sea shanty,

so we are bringing the music back here where it should be sung.

MAN SINGS STRIKE THE BELL

A quick wetting of the whistle and I'm ready to join in.

-ALL SINGING:

-# Look out to windward you can see it's going to blow

# Look at the glass you can see that it is fell

# We wish that he would hurry up and strike, strike the bell... #

Julia's husband is shantyman Derek Batters.

# There is the larboard watch, they're longing for their bunks

# They're looking out to windward they can see a great swell

# They're wishing that the second mate

# Would strike, strike the bell... #

The shantyman had the important task of keeping up morale on deck

and he would vary the song to match the task at hand.

# Look at the glass you can see that it's fell

# We wish that you would hurry up and strike, strike the bell... #

There were short drag shanties for jobs needing quick bursts of energy

and long drag shanties, which gave sailors a rest between hauls.

Derek is singing a pump shanty,

used when pumping the bilges of the ship to prevent it from sinking.

# And he's wishing that the second mate would strike, strike the bell

# Strike the bell, second mate, let's go below... #

But pump shanties also work rather well for swilling pints to -

an excellent way to end my day.

# See that it's fell

# We wish that you would hurry up and strike, strike the bell

# Strike the bell, second mate, let's go below

# Look out to windward, you can see it going to blow

# Look at the glass, you can see that it's fell

# And I wish that you would hurry up and strike, strike the bell! #

Bravo!

CHEERING

Today, I'm continuing my journey,

travelling south-west on the Wirral line towards Chester.

Chester was a welcome break for Victorians

from the grime and frantic pace of the industrial cities.

But I'm not stopping. I'm changing to the mid-Cheshire line.

I've travelled from salty Liverpool to leafy Cheshire.

Bradshaw's tells me that,

over a distance of two-and-three-quarter miles,

almost from Ashley to Knutsford,

stretches the fine park belonging to Lord Egerton.

At one time, it was 250,000 acres.

I shall get off the train at Knutsford. It seems to me that

Tatton Hall could be a good place to explore Victorian life,

both upstairs and downstairs.

-Have a good day.

-Thank you very much.

A couple of miles from Knutsford station lies an imposing

neoclassical country house.

The Egertons were highly regarded members of the aristocracy.

This was the part of society least touched by the upheavals

of the 19th century.

The aristocracy may have dabbled in industrial investments, or banking,

but they exercised hereditary power in Westminster,

the army and the Empire.

Their large country houses relied on highly skilled servants

and Carolyn Latham, from the Cheshire East Council,

knows all about life downstairs working for the Egertons.

Carolyn, an enormous establishment like Tatton Park,

how many staff did it take to run?

Over the years, somewhere between perhaps 40 and 20 was quite typical.

How many best guest rooms are there in Tatton Park?

This main block of the mansion has eight guest bedrooms,

all with ensuite dressing rooms.

The middle section of the mansion here is the family's more intimate,

personal, smaller apartments,

but about eight good guests could be situated within the household.

An invitation to an Egerton house party was much sought-after.

On these hectic occasions, the servants moved smartly up

and downstairs to attend to the needs of master and mistress.

Well, the kitchens are very large,

although notably lacking in modern conveniences and machinery.

Let's start with the people who were here.

What were the butler's duties?

So, the butler is...his main duties are around making sure that

household's running smoothly,

so he's looking after the male servants,

the grooms, the footmen, he's making sure that all the male

servants are all in the right places at the right time.

That the dinner's served on time, the drinks are served on time.

You know, he waits on as well.

He's there when the master of the household is around -

the butler wouldn't be far away from him.

Domestic service was Victorian Britain's

largest source of employment for women.

At Tatton Hall, the butler, the housekeeper and the chef

were at the top of the pecking order, while a housemaid was at the bottom.

What was life like for the most humble housemaid?

Well, quite long and hard I would think.

They were up early, they're the first up,

maybe half five, six o'clock in the morning.

They're getting the fireplaces ready for the other servants,

the higher up servants as well as for the household.

Serving breakfast trays, cleaning bedrooms, emptying bedpans.

The housekeeper would have made sure their time was really full

and accounted for.

They would have their set break times,

but also those lowest housemaids

and scullery maids, you know, there was a hierarchy within even

the servants eating, so they sat at the end.

They didn't really get to have the conversations

that the others were having, so their whole day was very structured

and they'd have gone to bed really quite late as well.

I'm travelling back in time, to the heyday of Tatton Hall,

to put my skills to the test as an under-butler,

eager to make a good impression on my rather stern superiors.

Will there be much more to be polished this afternoon, Mr Douglas?

Considerably more, Mr Portillo. Considerably more.

I think a little bit more elbow grease is required.

Ah, I can see you set very high standards, Mrs Cartwright,

-here at Tatton Park.

-Indeed, we do.

What we require, Mr Portillo, is 20% polish and 80% elbow grease.

What time would her ladyship be requiring her tea, Mr Douglas?

I think I'm correct in saying, Mrs Cartwright,

-her ladyship requested tea at four?

-Four o'clock, yes, on the dot.

-Four o'clock, Mr Portillo.

-On the dot, Mr Douglas.

How's it going now?

A vast improvement, yes.

Can you see your face in them?

Unfortunately, I can, Mrs Cartwright.

Tea, Lady Egerton.

-Shall I pour, Lady Egerton?

-No, I shall pour.

Yes, your ladyship.

Mr Portillo, a word, if I may.

Your shoes, your socks, your trousers.

Something amiss, Mr Douglas?

One can only assume that your previous employer set

a certain lower standard.

It's just as well that I have other career options.

In the mid-1800s, a factory job might have tempted a domestic servant

tired of responding to the master's summoning bell.

A job in the city offered privacy

and freedom at the end of the working day...

..but urban and factory life often shocked the new

worker from the countryside

and it appalled many in the middle classes, who read about it

for the first time in the novels of a pioneering female author.

I'm back in Knutsford to explore the life of Elizabeth Gaskell

in conversation with Diana Stenson from the local heritage centre.

Diana, what is this rather extraordinary structure?

This is the Gaskell Tower

and it is the only commemoration that we have officially

in the town to commemorate our most famous daughter.

So, is she quite highly regarded in Knutsford?

She was very highly regarded.

She was liked very much as a child when she lived here

and, of course, when she went on to have this successful career

and all the things that she wrote,

some of them had enormous social consequences.

She was very highly regarded and the family were very regarded as well.

And what do you think was Elizabeth Gaskell's legacy?

That she was the first female social novelist of serious matters.

A sort of female Dickens?

Very much so, and they were good friends.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford was first published as a serial

in Charles Dickens' journal, Household Words, in 1851.

It's her most famous book, a collection of comic sketches

which affectionately portray changing small-town customs.

Gaskell drew on her own experience of a happy

childhood in Knutsford, where she was raised by her aunt.

Cranford is famously set in and about Knutsford.

Is that very clear in the novel?

I think anybody that lived around here would have recognised

Knutsford as this lovely little cosy country market town

but quite a distance, as it would seem in those days, to the

huge industrial belching chimneys that we had in Manchester.

The railway comes to Knutsford in 1862,

long after Cranford is published.

Do the railways get a look in in the Gaskell novels?

They do. She wrote one particular short story called Lady Ludlow

and it was heralding the arrival, or the building,

of the railways in this area.

And the railway was all happening

and, blow me, Lady Ludlow decided, virtually at the last minute

when they're about to build a bend,

"I'm not selling you the land after all." So, it all fell apart.

And what was her attitude to the railways?

She had a feeling of the mood of the railways

because here we're sitting in an agricultural area, railway's coming,

then the railways are arriving and it speeded everything up.

People thought in a different way with the railway.

And so we would have our seasons here,

which was what dictated what went on on the farms,

and then the railways were speeding up

and it seemed to alter people's perception of time.

Young Elizabeth moved to Manchester when

she married William Gaskell in 1832.

The city opened her eyes to the plight of the urban working classes,

inspiring her to write her first book - Mary Barton.

She was the first person to write what you would call social novels.

She touched on and exposed a great deal of the disgraceful things that

were going on towards the workers in the Industrial Revolution.

There were hundreds of workers coming in, nay, thousands,

from agricultural land, from all over the North West,

coming in to work in the East Midlands,

having no idea that they'd be living in disgraceful cellars.

They had no... There was no sort of sewage, there was nothing.

It was dreadful and she exposed all that.

She had a lot of trouble, socially, because she was ostracised over

a lot of these things, but she stuck to it and we owe her a huge debt

in telling us what was going on.

People who only lived a mile or two away had no idea.

Elizabeth Gaskell's books were a counterpoint to the optimism

that the Victorian public had experienced at the Great Exhibition.

She reminds us that Britain's prosperous position

as the workshop of the world carried a human cost.

Her work is a valuable window on the grimmer

realities of the Industrial Revolution.

The thing that most determined Victorian architecture was glass

from St Helens and no industry made greater use of it than

the railways with their stunning stations.

Elizabeth Gaskell perceived that the trains were changing not only

the rural landscape but also the country way of life.

Although, at Tatton Park, rigid social structures endured.

As for my performance as an under-butler, I think I would have

been given, in the words of the sea shanty, the heave-ho.

'Next time, I'm blown away by beauty...'

We just soared over the valley, absolutely beautiful.

'..I work up a sweat, the Victorian way...'

Stoking up the fire, giving the locomotive a bit of oomph.

Builds good biceps, that.

'..and experience the ride of my life.'

THEY SCREAM